Related papers: The propagation of active-passive interfaces in ba…
Motivated by results for the propagation of active-passive interfaces of bacterial Serratia marcescens swarms [Nat. Comm., 9, 5373 (2018)] we use a hydrodynamic multiphase model to investigate the propagation of interfaces of active…
Efficient nutrient mixing is crucial for the survival of bacterial colonies and other living systems. This raises the question of whether the optimization of mixing through the emergence of active turbulent motion in bacterial swarms played…
Interaction between active materials and the boundaries of geometrical confinement is key to many emergent phenomena in active systems. For living active matter consisting of animal cells or motile bacteria, the confinement boundary is…
Inspired by recent experimental observation of patterning at the membrane of a living cell, we propose a generic model for the dynamics of a fluctuating interface driven by particle-like inclusions which stimulate its growth. We find that…
Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…
Bacteria are perhaps the simplest living systems capable of complex behaviour involving sensing and coherent, collective behaviour an example of which is the phenomena of swarming on agar surfaces. Two fundamental questions in bacterial…
Dense bacterial suspensions at fluid interfaces provide a natural platform to explore active turbulence in a dimensional mismatch: active units are restricted to a two-dimensional surface, while the induced flows extend into the surrounding…
We propose a computational framework to study the growth and spread of bacterial biofilms on interfaces, as well as the action of antibiotics on them. Bacterial membranes are represented by boundaries immersed in a fluid matrix and subject…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
Biomolecular condensates help organize the cell cytoplasm and nucleoplasm into spatial compartments with different chemical compositions. A key feature of such compositional patterning is the local enrichment of enzymatically active…
We study the mass-conserved reaction-diffusion system known as the wave-pinning model, which serves as a minimal framework for describing cell polarity. In this model, the interplay between reaction kinetics and slow diffusion forms a sharp…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
The emergent dynamics in phase-separated mixtures of isometric active and passive Brownian particles is studied numerically in two dimensions. A novel steady-state of well-defined traveling fronts is observed, where the interface between…
We investigate the effects of heterogeneous (spatially varying) activity in a hydrodynamical model for dense bacterial suspensions, confining ourselves to experimentally realizable, simple, quenched, activity patterns. We show that the…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
We investigate the effects of cooperativity between contagion processes that spread and persist in a host population. We propose and analyze a dynamical model in which individuals that are affected by one transmissible agent $A$ exhibit a…
We introduce and analyze a model for osmotically spreading biofilm colonies at solid-air interfaces that includes wetting phenomena, i.e. surface forces. The model combines a hydrodynamic description for biologically passive liquid…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…